Collected Prose

terrible catastrophe—not to be mentioned in our seemly history…. Enter Una—“Where is little Julian?” “He has gone out to walk.” “No; but I mean where is the place of little Julian, that you’ve been writing about him.” So I point to the page, at which she looks with all possible satisfaction; and stands watching the pen as it hurries forward. “I’ll put the ink nearer to you,” says she. “Father, are you going to write all this?” she adds, turning over the book…. I tell her that I am now writing about herself—“That’s nice writing,” says she…. Una now proposes to him to build a block house with her; so they set about it jointly; but it has scarcely risen above its foundation, before Julian tears it down. With unwearied patience, Una begins another. “Papa! ‘Ouse!” cries Julian, pointing to two blocks which he has laid together…. They quit the blocks, and Julian again offers to climb the chair to the bookcase; and is again forbidden by me;—whereupon he cries—Una runs to kiss and comfort him—and then comes to me with a solemn remonstrance, of no small length; the burthen being, “Father, you should not speak so loudly to a little boy who is only half years old”…. She comes and takes her place silently in my lap, resting her head on my shoulder. Julian has clambered into a chair at the window, and appears to observe and meditate; so that we have a very quiet interval, until he disturbs it by coming and pulling off her shoe. He seldom pretermits any mischief that his hand finds to do:—for instance, finding her bare knee, he has just taken occasion to pinch it with all his might …

    Hawthorne repeated the exercise four days later, on Thursday, March twenty-third, and six times more in 1849, covering what would amount to another thirty pages in Centenary Edition of the Notebooks . Adding to his descriptions of his children’s games and squabbles and inner storms, he sometimes paused to make a number of more generalized remarks about their personalities. Two small passages about Una are of particular interest, since she is usually taken to be the model on which he based the character of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter . From January 28, 1849: “Her beauty is the most flitting, transitory, most uncertain and unaccountable affair, that ever had a real existence; it beams out when nobody expects it, it has mysteriously passed away, when you think yourself sure of it;—if you glance sideways at her, you perhaps think it is illuminating her face, but, turning full round to enjoy it, it is gone again…. When really visible, it is rare and precious as the vision of an angel; it is a transfiguration—a grace, delicacy, an ethereal fineness, which, at once, in my secret soul, makes me give up all severe opinions that I may have begun to form respecting her. It is but fair to conclude that, on these occasions, we see her real soul; when she seems less lovely, we merely see something external. But, in truth, one manifestation belongs to her as much as another; for, before the establishment of principles, what is character but the series and succession of moods?” From July thirtieth of the same year: “… There is something that almost frightens me about the child—I know not whether elfish or angelic, but, at all events, supernatural. She steps so boldly into the midst of everything, shrinks from nothing, has such a comprehension of everything, seems at times to have but little delicacy, and anon shows that she possesses the finest essence of it; now so hard, now so tender; now so perfectly unreasonable, soon again so wise. In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her, in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell. The little boy is always the same child, and never varies in relation to me.”
    By the summer of 1851, Hawthorne was a seasoned observer of his own children, a veteran of family life. He was forty-seven years old and had been married for close to a decade. He couldn’t have known it then, but nearly every important word of fiction he would ever publish had already been written. Behind him were the two editions of Twice-Told Tales (1837 and 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (already finished and planned for publication in late 1851)—his entire output as a writer of short stories. His first two novels had been